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Rome: Decline and Fall? Part II: Institutions

225 points by picture 5y ago

erulabs 5y ago
I haven't read this part II yet, although I very much enjoyed part I - it's an after-work read for sure - I wanted to mention for anyone interested in Roman history, spotify has "The History of Rome" podcast that has been going for something like 15 years now, and is super excellent. It's become my favorite thing to listen to while I cook or clean. It looks like this covers Diocletian's monetary reforms, which is one of my absolute favorite parts of roman history - looking forward to it!
- Tagbert 5y ago
  Yes, “History of Rome” podcast is also available on other more open platforms not just Spotify.
- jmckib 5y ago
  Did you catch this article from the other day? I don't know much about Diocletian's monetary reforms (I'm still busy reading up on the history of the Republic), but his Edict of Maximum Prices was mentioned in it. https://www.bookandsword.com/2021/05/08/how-much-did-a-tunic-cost-in-the-roman-empire/ https://www.bookandsword.com/2021/05/08/how-much-did-a-tunic...
- ricree 5y ago
  > "The History of Rome" podcast that has been going for something like 15 years now, and is super excellent If you're talking about Mike Duncan's podcast, note that it ended in 2012 with the deposing of the final Western Emperor. There is a spiritual successor by Robin Pierson called "The History of Byzantium" that picks up shortly after the end and is still ongoing after over 230 episodes. Duncan's current podcast is "Revolutions", which covers a variety of historical revolutions. I've been listening for a bit now and am only on the third (French) of ten revolutions. Definitely recommend the show for people seeking a history podcast.
- ch4s3 5y ago
  I'd also recommend Mary Beard's book SPQR [1]. [1]https://www.amazon.com/SPQR-History-Ancient-Mary-Beard/dp/1631492225 https://www.amazon.com/SPQR-History-Ancient-Mary-Beard/dp/16...
  - billfruit 5y ago
    I'd recommend Gibbon, "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire".
    - ch4s3 5y ago
      I’ve skimmed some of it. I was under the impression that Gibbon’s decline narrative isn’t very well regarded among scholars today, but I don’t know enough to make any judgment there.
      - Ericson2314 5y ago
        Per part 1: > While I am going at points to gesture to Gibbon’s thinking, we’re not going to debate him; he is the ‘old man’ of our title. Gibbon himself largely exists only in historiographical footnotes and intellectual histories; he is not at this point seriously defended nor seriously attacked but discussed as the venerable, but now out of date, origin point for all of this bickering. Holding it in ill-regard would be punching down. It's an 18th work! If it were at all up to date, that would indicate serious stagnation in the academy. Of course, there has been a great amassing of new evidence since then, especially non-textual.
        Ericson2314 5y ago
        If you want more intellectual history, I recommend "The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire" by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Rostovtzeff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Rostovtzeff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominate == USSR, basically. It's too editorialized to stand as a modern historical text, but it's great fun to read nonetheless!
        5y ago
- mongol 5y ago
  I like Emperors of Rome podcast Very interesting and pleasant
- cecida 5y ago
  The History of Rome was the very first podcast I can remember listening to on a weekly basis. It was the era when the Nokia N95 was very much the flagship almost smartphone, and I got so interested in the idea of being able to automatically subscribe to these on-demand and niche "radio shows" that I suffered the torture of writing an app for the Symbian OS.
  - namdnay 5y ago
    Oh god with that weird proto-c++ without exceptions or the STL…
biorach 5y ago
Excellent article.
nescioquid 5y ago
Great article. One bit piqued my interest in particular: > ... when actually performing a regular census proved difficult, Constantine responded by mandating that coloni – the tenant farmers and sharecroppers of the empire – must stay on the land they had been farming so that their landlords would be able to pay the taxes, casually abrogating a traditional freedom of Roman citizens for millions of farmers out of administrative convenience. Are the roots of serfdom traceable back to this mandate? It's tempting to imagine so, as serfs were not slaves per se, but tied to the land they worked.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/1780747411/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/1780747411/ ) presents serfdom as one outcome of a battle between the head of state and local nobility that was common across societies, with serfdom being what the nobility wants and freeholding being what the head of state wants. The analysis is that each side wants peasants to have the status that makes tax collection easier for their side. Interestingly, those positions have reversed in the modern day, with the analogue of serfdom -- W2 employment -- heavily favored by the state, and the analogue of freeholding -- employment as a contractor -- preferable to employers (who mostly lack the power to implement it over the state's objection).
  - somewhereoutth 5y ago
    Your modern day analogy fails. Corporations prefer contractors because they can use the power asymmetry to extract more value for lower pay. Formal employment is favoured by a democratically elected state, as it works to restore the power balance to the voters through appropriate regulation (assuming of course you live in a modern well functioning democratic society - which I understand is not the case in many places).
    - 7495743 5y ago
      I strongly disagree. Having been both an employee and a contractor, both in the gig economy sense and the consultant sense of the word, I very much prefer and felt much freer as a contractor. I think the reason states prefer people to be employees is probably the same reason the Roman state mandated farmers and sharecroppers stay on the land, it makes us much easier to tax and control. There is probably also the added benefit that it's more difficult for employees to move into a position were they can compete with the corporations that pay for the politicians campaigns in democratically elected states.
jcranmer 5y ago
An argument I'd like to see a little more is one that argues that the Roman Empire actually 'fell' in the Crisis of the Third Century. This seems to account for many of the continuity arguments and catastrophe arguments at the same time (although my understanding is that the economic cataclysm actually happens relatively late--I'm sure this will be addressed in Part III, though): the post-Roman states are largely continuous with the post-Crisis Roman norms, although on a much smaller scale due to the loss of state capacity.
- wffurr 5y ago
  Isn't this addressed pretty early on in this essay? "But here too, we have to be careful in defining what that governance meant, because the Roman Empire of August, 378 AD was not the Roman Empire of August, 14 AD." "are we comparing [the decline of the fifth and sixth centuries] to the empire of Hadrian (r. 117-138) or the empire of Valentinian (r. 364-375)? Because most students are generally more familiar with the former (because it is was tends to be get focused on in teaching), there is a tendency to compare 476 directly with Rome under the Nervan-Antonines (96-192) without taking into account the events of the third and early fourth century."
- zozbot234 5y ago
  It definitely didn't "fall" at that time in any real sense, but it seems to have started a terminal decline that continued all the way through the Early Middle Ages (with no clearly identifiable "fall" event, albeit the convention of picking 476 CE, being roughly at the midpoint, is arguably as good as any!). By the same standard, one could argue that recovery and renewed growth following this "decline" state began roughly in the Late Middle Ages and continued throughout the Renaissance and the Early Modern Period, essentially setting the stage for the Age of Exploration and Industrial Revolution as truly "disruptive" events from a long-run POV.
  - newaccount2021 5y ago
  - wins32767 5y ago
stereolambda 5y ago
While the subject matter of the series is very interesting, I feel that it is a trend of nuancing things out of proportion. Yes, the Roman emperorship claim was continually picked up, but there were differences (in the West especially) in the organization and reach of these regimes. The Church became more of a parallel branch of power and not a subordinate. Yes, literacy was not lost altogether and people of these periods preserved some books. But there was lots of stuff that would've been preserved by a more diverse culture, where intellectualism wasn't confined to Christian monasteries. There's a whole long story of how the West lost and then gradually recovered Plato and Aristotle, because for the long time they couldn't read Greek, the Ostrogothic king killed the early potential translator to Latin (Boethius) and then there were ages before these foundational texts were regained from Arabic and then Byzantine sources. Lots of philosophical and historical books (such as many parts of Livy's history of Rome itself) were preserved only as summaries, because apparently no one wanted/needed to even read them. Myself, I would distinguish the (okay, gradual) fall of the empire as the political regime and the decline of the civilization. The former, I think, was actually a good thing, since I cannot imagine another road to the modern experience of personal and political freedom (however flawed and maybe fleeting) from the centralized and despotic culture of the late Empire. (I don't have strong convictions about the causes of the latter).
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > But there was lots of stuff that would've been preserved by a more diverse culture, where intellectualism wasn't confined to Christian monasteries The previous post in the series argues convincingly that this simply wouldn't have happened - that "preserving stuff for posterity" just wasn't a norm in the Classical world, and that even the Musaeum and Library of Alexandria (a rather unique institution in the Classical world that would have been roughly comparable to a modern research university) did a pretty poor job of it by later standards. The monasteries really were unique.
  - stereolambda 5y ago
    I'm not saying this would be preserved for the preservation's sake, but because it would be interesting to people, especially those who didn't feel the need to conform to a very strict worldview and reject pagan lies and frivolities. (This isn't necessarily a dig at Christianity itself, things were always a little different with lay intellectuals: but these kind of disappeared for a while, in the Latin West of course.) As I hinted at, the stuff that was lost was not some random antiquarian junk but books of well established, even then, usefulness for science/scholarship.
jnurmine 5y ago
One of the books I'm currently reading is Edward J. Watts' "Mortal Republic - How Rome Fell into Tyranny" which details how Rome the republic transformed into a dictatorship. It is intriguing, parts are like the TV-series House of Cards with an abundance of dirty tricks pulled by opponents against each other. One thing I've never quite understood from history books though: there was so much wealth, people with big palaces, large tracts of land, artwork (like statues), gold, from wealthy families, and so on. Where did all that wealth go in the end?
- imtringued 5y ago
  According to Keynes most of the wealth was never created because the shiny brain parasite called gold was considered wealth and its liquidity preference exceeded that of physical capital. When you think about it, gold never changes over time, so calling it wealth is obviously absurd. The moment you have dug it out, you apparently have wealth. People like living in a parallel world I guess.
- Dumblydorr 5y ago
  Rome's territory was sacked by "barbarians", nevermind the pilfering and stealing other "Romans" did. Consider that when emperors died, the usual course was to murder their whole family and sack their belongings, all for good measure. It was not a stable thing to be at the top in Roman society, you gained a target on your back due to your wealth and power in an inherently violent society. Combine all this with looting over the centuries, and what's left to us is a lot less than originally existed.
  - SkyMarshal 5y ago
    Sounds a little like the Communist Party of China, with its regular purges of high level rivals.
    - toiletfuneral 5y ago
- 5y ago
Leary 5y ago
Would love to see more analysis of the external reasons for Rome's decline. Namely, who were the people who could vigorously challenge Rome?
- mr_toad 5y ago
  In one word, the Goths. Everyone has their own opinion, mine is that it mostly comes down to population. The population of the Roman Empire decline due to plague, while the Gothic population and culture had grown with better agricultural technology. When the Huns pushed vast numbers of Goths into the weakened Roman empire in the west they further weakened it. Italy starved, and they lost the ability to raise effective armies. Rome itself eventually fell to siege and starvation.
- baud147258 5y ago
  On the exterior, peer powers like the Parthian and Sassanid Empire in the East. On the interior, successful military leaders who tried to become emperor, weakening the Empire from within, which then allowed foreign powers to invade (though some of them were invited as foederati) The author also talked about that in another post [1], though it's not the focus of it (mostly in the 'Kicking, Gouging and Screaming' part). [1] https://acoup.blog/2021/07/30/collections-the-queens-latin-or-who-were-the-romans-part-v-saving-and-losing-an-empire/ https://acoup.blog/2021/07/30/collections-the-queens-latin-o...
glogla 5y ago
Ah, what a wonderful find. That whole site is a perfect weekend rabbit hole to fall to.
supperburg 5y ago
spaetzleesser 5y ago
Considering that the fall of the Roman Empire took centuries of slow changes. was I wonder if people there even noticed. Seems a lot of these things can only be noticed after the fact and over times much longer than a human lifespan
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  Rome hadn't been sacked for like a thousand of years, so the first time that happened again, you bet they noticed ! https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/12/chemistry-of-empire-last-roman-empress.html https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/12/chemistry-of-em...
- prewett 5y ago
  I expect they at least heard stories from the good ol' days from their grandparents. Every so often you'd probably hear a reminiscence about some aspect of life that was easier, or some piece of technology that is no longer available.
chanakya 5y ago
I think those looking for deep causes for the decline of the Roman Empire are looking for the wrong thing. Like entropy, the presence of dynamism, coordinated energy and cohesion in societies is the exception, and the natural state is a sort of mediocre Malthusian sameness that the Empire declined into. Civilization is sustained by bursts of energy and confidence which generally comes from new ideas and a vision of themselves and the world which galvanizes people and has them build empires, institutions and cultural creations and structures.
- chanakya 5y ago
  So the real question to ask is: what ideas and vision gave Rome that coordinated energy in the first place, and one that lasted so many centuries before it got tired and lost its ability to energize people? A related question: how much longer can the ideas of the Enlightenment drive the current global civilization (created in the West), and are we seeing signs of the West losing confidence in itself?
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    You can read a previous series by the same author about that : https://acoup.blog/2021/06/11/collections-the-queens-latin-or-who-were-the-romans-part-i-beginnings-and-legends/ https://acoup.blog/2021/06/11/collections-the-queens-latin-o...
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > are we seeing signs of the West losing confidence in itself? Plenty of those around. I won't get into them because it gets treated as "doing politics" and usually attracts angry replies, even though the signs of degeneration can be seen uniformly on either side of the mainstream political debate.
  - ransom1538 5y ago
    "So the real question to ask is: what ideas and vision gave Rome that coordinated energy in the first place," Taxes. I would conjecture pre-Roman when groups would sack a town they would kill all males and enslave the rest. Taxes changed the game. This created a concept of managing states. Instead of killing everyone in a village - you wanted them to work hard and pay taxes. This also had an unforeseen side affect: if you were a good tax payer you were protected. People wanted to be a Roman citizen. The Romans would destroy anyone taking their tax money. You could safely produce a crop or raise cattle. Other cultures pre-Roman had taxes but were always caught up in ethnic cleansing - thus destroying their tax base. Romans could care less: Spaniard, Syrian, Egyptian, didn't matter: just pay taxes. If you inflate currencies to the point taxes mean nothing: doom.
known 5y ago
unity1001 5y ago
Starting from middle republic, the patrician class (1% if you will) started concentrating large tracts of land in their hands in gigantic latifundias. These started spamming the farm produce economy with cheap, slave-labor produced grain. That bankrupted small farmers and they sold out to patricians and went to cities (Rome etc) or became slaves or indentured servants in latifundias. That made decline of Rome accelerate geometrically. Much of the middle to late republic conflicts stem from that discontent with patricians and their rising power. Populares faction tried to set things right starting with Gracchi brothers, who tried to limit max wealth and redistribute excess land, however they got murdered by patricians. From then on there was no way to save Rome. Patricians won. Caesar represents the last but weak attempt by the populares to change some things. Which Caesar did even if he wasnt able to dare impose wealth caps or redistribute land. Even for that, he was killed by patricians too. Patricians won the ultimate victory while ensuring the fall of Rome. It wasnt 100 years before the privatized Roman army started getting undone by rising barbarians despite Rome's technological superiority. (which was waning too) The reason for that military decline is simple - Rome's power always resided in its large population who believed in Roman society enough to fight and die for it. After patricians made Rome into an entirely slave based society after destroying the free Rome and what power free, working class Romans had in Roman society, and even going to the extent of privatizing the army to not pay for it in taxes, the manpower and logistical advantage of Rome was lost. Private armies paid by rich strongmen are incompatible with democracy (civil wars era, rich patricians vying for power with their privately-raised legions leading to triumvirate and ending with octavian), and the privately funded army of a hierarchical empire is prone to not preferring to die for the sake of their society and instead fighting for their pay and loot. So the rapid decline. Rome went down crashing when it forfeited its people. It deserved its fall.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Simon_O_Rourke 5y ago
It's great to see such a brilliant public academic, if Devereaux would mind being labeled as such, produce such wonderful articles. He blows the cobwebs off of dusty history, and I find the way he deals with iron mongering, textiles as well as castle building to be really insightful.
- alexpetralia 5y ago
  Very much agreed - I have never been interested in history, but his essays I find enthralling. To everyone who enjoys his work, please consider supporting him on Patreon (only $5!).
inglor_cz 5y ago
The remark about the fact that walls emerging around cities are an indicator of deteriorating security hits close to home. Last year, I bought a small house in a development project in my city of birth, Ostrava, Czech Republic. It is not finished yet. But the development of 34 houses will be walled, presumably to isolate it from the nearby neighbourhood of block of flats, which isn't the best part of Ostrava, though not the worst either. When I grew up there, there weren't any walled developments in the city. They have proliferated in last 10 years or so. I wonder to what degree this is a real deterioration of security and to what degree it is perception. I do not feel unsafe in Ostrava, but some visitors do, and being a fairly fit strong man in his 40s, I am not a typical street crime victim; most people whom I know and who were victims of street crime, were smaller/older/frailer/female. So it might be my perception that is skewed, not theirs.

225 points by picture 5y ago

I haven't read this part II yet, although I very much enjoyed part I - it's an after-work read for sure - I wanted to mention for anyone interested in Roman history, spotify has "The History of Rome" podcast that has been going for something like 15 years now, and is super excellent. It's become my favorite thing to listen to while I cook or clean. It looks like this covers Diocletian's monetary reforms, which is one of my absolute favorite parts of roman history - looking forward to it!

Tagbert 5y ago
Yes, “History of Rome” podcast is also available on other more open platforms not just Spotify.
jmckib 5y ago
Did you catch this article from the other day? I don't know much about Diocletian's monetary reforms (I'm still busy reading up on the history of the Republic), but his Edict of Maximum Prices was mentioned in it. https://www.bookandsword.com/2021/05/08/how-much-did-a-tunic-cost-in-the-roman-empire/ https://www.bookandsword.com/2021/05/08/how-much-did-a-tunic...
ricree 5y ago
> "The History of Rome" podcast that has been going for something like 15 years now, and is super excellent If you're talking about Mike Duncan's podcast, note that it ended in 2012 with the deposing of the final Western Emperor. There is a spiritual successor by Robin Pierson called "The History of Byzantium" that picks up shortly after the end and is still ongoing after over 230 episodes. Duncan's current podcast is "Revolutions", which covers a variety of historical revolutions. I've been listening for a bit now and am only on the third (French) of ten revolutions. Definitely recommend the show for people seeking a history podcast.
ch4s3 5y ago
I'd also recommend Mary Beard's book SPQR [1]. [1]https://www.amazon.com/SPQR-History-Ancient-Mary-Beard/dp/1631492225 https://www.amazon.com/SPQR-History-Ancient-Mary-Beard/dp/16...
- billfruit 5y ago
  I'd recommend Gibbon, "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire".
  - ch4s3 5y ago
    I’ve skimmed some of it. I was under the impression that Gibbon’s decline narrative isn’t very well regarded among scholars today, but I don’t know enough to make any judgment there.
    - Ericson2314 5y ago
      Per part 1: > While I am going at points to gesture to Gibbon’s thinking, we’re not going to debate him; he is the ‘old man’ of our title. Gibbon himself largely exists only in historiographical footnotes and intellectual histories; he is not at this point seriously defended nor seriously attacked but discussed as the venerable, but now out of date, origin point for all of this bickering. Holding it in ill-regard would be punching down. It's an 18th work! If it were at all up to date, that would indicate serious stagnation in the academy. Of course, there has been a great amassing of new evidence since then, especially non-textual.
      - Ericson2314 5y ago
        If you want more intellectual history, I recommend "The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire" by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Rostovtzeff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Rostovtzeff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominate == USSR, basically. It's too editorialized to stand as a modern historical text, but it's great fun to read nonetheless!
      - 5y ago
mongol 5y ago
I like Emperors of Rome podcast Very interesting and pleasant
cecida 5y ago
The History of Rome was the very first podcast I can remember listening to on a weekly basis. It was the era when the Nokia N95 was very much the flagship almost smartphone, and I got so interested in the idea of being able to automatically subscribe to these on-demand and niche "radio shows" that I suffered the torture of writing an app for the Symbian OS.
- namdnay 5y ago
  Oh god with that weird proto-c++ without exceptions or the STL…

biorach 5y ago

Excellent article.

nescioquid 5y ago

Great article. One bit piqued my interest in particular: > ... when actually performing a regular census proved difficult, Constantine responded by mandating that coloni – the tenant farmers and sharecroppers of the empire – must stay on the land they had been farming so that their landlords would be able to pay the taxes, casually abrogating a traditional freedom of Roman citizens for millions of farmers out of administrative convenience. Are the roots of serfdom traceable back to this mandate? It's tempting to imagine so, as serfs were not slaves per se, but tied to the land they worked.

thaumasiotes 5y ago
Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/1780747411/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/1780747411/ ) presents serfdom as one outcome of a battle between the head of state and local nobility that was common across societies, with serfdom being what the nobility wants and freeholding being what the head of state wants. The analysis is that each side wants peasants to have the status that makes tax collection easier for their side. Interestingly, those positions have reversed in the modern day, with the analogue of serfdom -- W2 employment -- heavily favored by the state, and the analogue of freeholding -- employment as a contractor -- preferable to employers (who mostly lack the power to implement it over the state's objection).
- somewhereoutth 5y ago
  Your modern day analogy fails. Corporations prefer contractors because they can use the power asymmetry to extract more value for lower pay. Formal employment is favoured by a democratically elected state, as it works to restore the power balance to the voters through appropriate regulation (assuming of course you live in a modern well functioning democratic society - which I understand is not the case in many places).
  - 7495743 5y ago
    I strongly disagree. Having been both an employee and a contractor, both in the gig economy sense and the consultant sense of the word, I very much prefer and felt much freer as a contractor. I think the reason states prefer people to be employees is probably the same reason the Roman state mandated farmers and sharecroppers stay on the land, it makes us much easier to tax and control. There is probably also the added benefit that it's more difficult for employees to move into a position were they can compete with the corporations that pay for the politicians campaigns in democratically elected states.

jcranmer 5y ago

An argument I'd like to see a little more is one that argues that the Roman Empire actually 'fell' in the Crisis of the Third Century. This seems to account for many of the continuity arguments and catastrophe arguments at the same time (although my understanding is that the economic cataclysm actually happens relatively late--I'm sure this will be addressed in Part III, though): the post-Roman states are largely continuous with the post-Crisis Roman norms, although on a much smaller scale due to the loss of state capacity.

wffurr 5y ago
Isn't this addressed pretty early on in this essay? "But here too, we have to be careful in defining what that governance meant, because the Roman Empire of August, 378 AD was not the Roman Empire of August, 14 AD." "are we comparing [the decline of the fifth and sixth centuries] to the empire of Hadrian (r. 117-138) or the empire of Valentinian (r. 364-375)? Because most students are generally more familiar with the former (because it is was tends to be get focused on in teaching), there is a tendency to compare 476 directly with Rome under the Nervan-Antonines (96-192) without taking into account the events of the third and early fourth century."
zozbot234 5y ago
It definitely didn't "fall" at that time in any real sense, but it seems to have started a terminal decline that continued all the way through the Early Middle Ages (with no clearly identifiable "fall" event, albeit the convention of picking 476 CE, being roughly at the midpoint, is arguably as good as any!). By the same standard, one could argue that recovery and renewed growth following this "decline" state began roughly in the Late Middle Ages and continued throughout the Renaissance and the Early Modern Period, essentially setting the stage for the Age of Exploration and Industrial Revolution as truly "disruptive" events from a long-run POV.
- newaccount2021 5y ago
- wins32767 5y ago

stereolambda 5y ago

While the subject matter of the series is very interesting, I feel that it is a trend of nuancing things out of proportion. Yes, the Roman emperorship claim was continually picked up, but there were differences (in the West especially) in the organization and reach of these regimes. The Church became more of a parallel branch of power and not a subordinate. Yes, literacy was not lost altogether and people of these periods preserved some books. But there was lots of stuff that would've been preserved by a more diverse culture, where intellectualism wasn't confined to Christian monasteries. There's a whole long story of how the West lost and then gradually recovered Plato and Aristotle, because for the long time they couldn't read Greek, the Ostrogothic king killed the early potential translator to Latin (Boethius) and then there were ages before these foundational texts were regained from Arabic and then Byzantine sources. Lots of philosophical and historical books (such as many parts of Livy's history of Rome itself) were preserved only as summaries, because apparently no one wanted/needed to even read them. Myself, I would distinguish the (okay, gradual) fall of the empire as the political regime and the decline of the civilization. The former, I think, was actually a good thing, since I cannot imagine another road to the modern experience of personal and political freedom (however flawed and maybe fleeting) from the centralized and despotic culture of the late Empire. (I don't have strong convictions about the causes of the latter).

zozbot234 5y ago
> But there was lots of stuff that would've been preserved by a more diverse culture, where intellectualism wasn't confined to Christian monasteries The previous post in the series argues convincingly that this simply wouldn't have happened - that "preserving stuff for posterity" just wasn't a norm in the Classical world, and that even the Musaeum and Library of Alexandria (a rather unique institution in the Classical world that would have been roughly comparable to a modern research university) did a pretty poor job of it by later standards. The monasteries really were unique.
- stereolambda 5y ago
  I'm not saying this would be preserved for the preservation's sake, but because it would be interesting to people, especially those who didn't feel the need to conform to a very strict worldview and reject pagan lies and frivolities. (This isn't necessarily a dig at Christianity itself, things were always a little different with lay intellectuals: but these kind of disappeared for a while, in the Latin West of course.) As I hinted at, the stuff that was lost was not some random antiquarian junk but books of well established, even then, usefulness for science/scholarship.

jnurmine 5y ago

One of the books I'm currently reading is Edward J. Watts' "Mortal Republic - How Rome Fell into Tyranny" which details how Rome the republic transformed into a dictatorship. It is intriguing, parts are like the TV-series House of Cards with an abundance of dirty tricks pulled by opponents against each other. One thing I've never quite understood from history books though: there was so much wealth, people with big palaces, large tracts of land, artwork (like statues), gold, from wealthy families, and so on. Where did all that wealth go in the end?

imtringued 5y ago
According to Keynes most of the wealth was never created because the shiny brain parasite called gold was considered wealth and its liquidity preference exceeded that of physical capital. When you think about it, gold never changes over time, so calling it wealth is obviously absurd. The moment you have dug it out, you apparently have wealth. People like living in a parallel world I guess.
Dumblydorr 5y ago
Rome's territory was sacked by "barbarians", nevermind the pilfering and stealing other "Romans" did. Consider that when emperors died, the usual course was to murder their whole family and sack their belongings, all for good measure. It was not a stable thing to be at the top in Roman society, you gained a target on your back due to your wealth and power in an inherently violent society. Combine all this with looting over the centuries, and what's left to us is a lot less than originally existed.
- SkyMarshal 5y ago
  Sounds a little like the Communist Party of China, with its regular purges of high level rivals.
  - toiletfuneral 5y ago
5y ago

Leary 5y ago

Would love to see more analysis of the external reasons for Rome's decline. Namely, who were the people who could vigorously challenge Rome?

mr_toad 5y ago
In one word, the Goths. Everyone has their own opinion, mine is that it mostly comes down to population. The population of the Roman Empire decline due to plague, while the Gothic population and culture had grown with better agricultural technology. When the Huns pushed vast numbers of Goths into the weakened Roman empire in the west they further weakened it. Italy starved, and they lost the ability to raise effective armies. Rome itself eventually fell to siege and starvation.
baud147258 5y ago
On the exterior, peer powers like the Parthian and Sassanid Empire in the East. On the interior, successful military leaders who tried to become emperor, weakening the Empire from within, which then allowed foreign powers to invade (though some of them were invited as foederati) The author also talked about that in another post [1], though it's not the focus of it (mostly in the 'Kicking, Gouging and Screaming' part). [1] https://acoup.blog/2021/07/30/collections-the-queens-latin-or-who-were-the-romans-part-v-saving-and-losing-an-empire/ https://acoup.blog/2021/07/30/collections-the-queens-latin-o...

glogla 5y ago

Ah, what a wonderful find. That whole site is a perfect weekend rabbit hole to fall to.

supperburg 5y ago

spaetzleesser 5y ago

Considering that the fall of the Roman Empire took centuries of slow changes. was I wonder if people there even noticed. Seems a lot of these things can only be noticed after the fact and over times much longer than a human lifespan

BlueTemplar 5y ago
Rome hadn't been sacked for like a thousand of years, so the first time that happened again, you bet they noticed ! https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/12/chemistry-of-empire-last-roman-empress.html https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/12/chemistry-of-em...
prewett 5y ago
I expect they at least heard stories from the good ol' days from their grandparents. Every so often you'd probably hear a reminiscence about some aspect of life that was easier, or some piece of technology that is no longer available.

chanakya 5y ago

I think those looking for deep causes for the decline of the Roman Empire are looking for the wrong thing. Like entropy, the presence of dynamism, coordinated energy and cohesion in societies is the exception, and the natural state is a sort of mediocre Malthusian sameness that the Empire declined into. Civilization is sustained by bursts of energy and confidence which generally comes from new ideas and a vision of themselves and the world which galvanizes people and has them build empires, institutions and cultural creations and structures.

chanakya 5y ago
So the real question to ask is: what ideas and vision gave Rome that coordinated energy in the first place, and one that lasted so many centuries before it got tired and lost its ability to energize people? A related question: how much longer can the ideas of the Enlightenment drive the current global civilization (created in the West), and are we seeing signs of the West losing confidence in itself?
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  You can read a previous series by the same author about that : https://acoup.blog/2021/06/11/collections-the-queens-latin-or-who-were-the-romans-part-i-beginnings-and-legends/ https://acoup.blog/2021/06/11/collections-the-queens-latin-o...
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > are we seeing signs of the West losing confidence in itself? Plenty of those around. I won't get into them because it gets treated as "doing politics" and usually attracts angry replies, even though the signs of degeneration can be seen uniformly on either side of the mainstream political debate.
- ransom1538 5y ago
  "So the real question to ask is: what ideas and vision gave Rome that coordinated energy in the first place," Taxes. I would conjecture pre-Roman when groups would sack a town they would kill all males and enslave the rest. Taxes changed the game. This created a concept of managing states. Instead of killing everyone in a village - you wanted them to work hard and pay taxes. This also had an unforeseen side affect: if you were a good tax payer you were protected. People wanted to be a Roman citizen. The Romans would destroy anyone taking their tax money. You could safely produce a crop or raise cattle. Other cultures pre-Roman had taxes but were always caught up in ethnic cleansing - thus destroying their tax base. Romans could care less: Spaniard, Syrian, Egyptian, didn't matter: just pay taxes. If you inflate currencies to the point taxes mean nothing: doom.

known 5y ago

unity1001 5y ago

Starting from middle republic, the patrician class (1% if you will) started concentrating large tracts of land in their hands in gigantic latifundias. These started spamming the farm produce economy with cheap, slave-labor produced grain. That bankrupted small farmers and they sold out to patricians and went to cities (Rome etc) or became slaves or indentured servants in latifundias. That made decline of Rome accelerate geometrically. Much of the middle to late republic conflicts stem from that discontent with patricians and their rising power. Populares faction tried to set things right starting with Gracchi brothers, who tried to limit max wealth and redistribute excess land, however they got murdered by patricians. From then on there was no way to save Rome. Patricians won. Caesar represents the last but weak attempt by the populares to change some things. Which Caesar did even if he wasnt able to dare impose wealth caps or redistribute land. Even for that, he was killed by patricians too. Patricians won the ultimate victory while ensuring the fall of Rome. It wasnt 100 years before the privatized Roman army started getting undone by rising barbarians despite Rome's technological superiority. (which was waning too) The reason for that military decline is simple - Rome's power always resided in its large population who believed in Roman society enough to fight and die for it. After patricians made Rome into an entirely slave based society after destroying the free Rome and what power free, working class Romans had in Roman society, and even going to the extent of privatizing the army to not pay for it in taxes, the manpower and logistical advantage of Rome was lost. Private armies paid by rich strongmen are incompatible with democracy (civil wars era, rich patricians vying for power with their privately-raised legions leading to triumvirate and ending with octavian), and the privately funded army of a hierarchical empire is prone to not preferring to die for the sake of their society and instead fighting for their pay and loot. So the rapid decline. Rome went down crashing when it forfeited its people. It deserved its fall.

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Simon_O_Rourke 5y ago

It's great to see such a brilliant public academic, if Devereaux would mind being labeled as such, produce such wonderful articles. He blows the cobwebs off of dusty history, and I find the way he deals with iron mongering, textiles as well as castle building to be really insightful.

alexpetralia 5y ago
Very much agreed - I have never been interested in history, but his essays I find enthralling. To everyone who enjoys his work, please consider supporting him on Patreon (only $5!).

inglor_cz 5y ago

The remark about the fact that walls emerging around cities are an indicator of deteriorating security hits close to home. Last year, I bought a small house in a development project in my city of birth, Ostrava, Czech Republic. It is not finished yet. But the development of 34 houses will be walled, presumably to isolate it from the nearby neighbourhood of block of flats, which isn't the best part of Ostrava, though not the worst either. When I grew up there, there weren't any walled developments in the city. They have proliferated in last 10 years or so. I wonder to what degree this is a real deterioration of security and to what degree it is perception. I do not feel unsafe in Ostrava, but some visitors do, and being a fairly fit strong man in his 40s, I am not a typical street crime victim; most people whom I know and who were victims of street crime, were smaller/older/frailer/female. So it might be my perception that is skewed, not theirs.